Posts by Chris Roberts

AI threatens to automate away the clergy

Re: World's simplest AI

Forty years ago I wrote a twenty questions game that just pseudo randomly answered Yes or No. After an answer the player could choose 'Ask another question' or 'Play Again' - unless they hit twenty in which case they got a sorry you lose, play again?

I got quite a few fellow uni students to try it and being logical science types they would run through until they got a Yes for a question they thought was the correct answer. Surprisingly few of them noticed what I had done and were amazed by the programs ability to understand the questions. It was fun for a few hours at least.

Getting to the bottom of BMW's pay-as-you-toast subscription failure

I thought the other idea was you could leave options off to get the rrp below the £40k extra vehicle tax threshold then add the options after purchase.

For BMW it means they have to put everything on the car, but that simplifies the build process, means you only need to run the model through one WLTP test and can still offer the customer the choice of specific items rather than packs.

If you are not sure if you will use an option you can rent it for a bit then do a lifetime purchase if you really want it. It also means if you buy a used car you can add options that may not have been chosen originally. I can see they may have done a Tesla and made the options belong to the original purchasor so they get turned off if the car goes through the dealer network.

Yes, the monthly rental looks like an insidious pay-to-play rental scheme, but as above you can just buy the permanent option for what it would have cost when the car was spec'd anyway.

Another redesign on the cards for iPhone as EU rules call for removable batteries

Re: standardization of removable batteries would be a great follow up

The main issue is that 18650 batteries by definition are 18mm in diameter and many laptops are significantly thinner than that. If you want to lug a chunky beast of a laptop around though I don't see why not, up to you if you use cheapo cells and destroy an expensive bit of equipment though, the manufacturer will likely only warranty cover when specific cells are used.

The power tool packs do have 18650 size cells in them, they just tend to be the welded tab type connections, if you want to buy equivalent high power/quality cells they are not cheap. If you use cheap replacement cells the manufacturer fast charger may have an issue leading to a fire so part of it is safety and reliability in a less than kind working environment.

Yes, I get your point, however there will be a mass of technical and legislative reasons why it might not be a great idea.

Family-owned aerospace biz throws a wrench in Boeing IP lawsuit

Tool names

Is the FFTD the first hydrospanner?

Gen Z and Millennials don't know what their colleagues are talking about half the time

Re: Communication

It is meeting and memo (remember those?) language used by manglement and marketing to make themselves sound like they are doing something useful and productive. I'm in the older set and like you have occasionally thrown in my own terms just to confuse them. I think the percentages are just that way because we have been exposed for longer learnt to deal with it, not because we like it.

"Kadir beneath Mo Moteh"

"Unzak and Vhila as children?"

Biden: I want standard EV chargers made in America by 2024 – get on it

Re: Somehow...

Should be fine at 40 - 100kV, but as you say best not to get too close while live.

Beijing grants permit to 'flying car' that can handle 'roads and low altitude'

New definition of chopper

See title

BOFH and the case of the Zoom call that never was

I was once asked to check a projector as it was apparently not working, I switched the attached PC on and amazingly it started working. A few weeks later it wasn't working again, but this time it was because the principal had switched it on by moving the voltage switch from 230 to 120 and thus had turned it off rather permanently.

So you want to replace workers with AI? Watch out for retraining fees, they're a killer

Re: Who?

The discount you get is your time, normally you can be queuing for ten minutes, removing everything from your trolley and putting it back into bags in your trolley in a rushed way. Self scan lets you walk up to the payment device, scan a barcode, tap a couple of times, pay and off to the car.

Space dust reveals Earth-killer asteroids tough to destroy

Raise the spinnaker

Wrap it in a sheet/net then use a solar sails to pull it off course.

Re: Strike!

Must admit I was wondering if they were going to fake a sexy asteroid wandering close by maybe set some nuclear fireworks off to catch its attention.

Let me X-plane: Boeing R&D unit sheds rudder, ailerons, flaps for DARPA project

Re: Goo goo, gah gah

They are not words from a niche industry or technology, they are marketing neologisms cooked up to try and sound like they are doing something new, exciting or cutting edge. The sad thing is while others have commented that this is not a new idea, they are doing new research and, potentially finding exciting solutions and applications. It could be that English is not the author's first language and so just used words that he knows or has heard or read being used, you would hope however that a press release would have been checked by someone that is.

Re: Goo goo, gah gah

"It's a quote from Graham Drozeski, an american with a PhD. he's not stupid, or a child. He simply uses language in a different way from you."

I'll give him the benefit of the doubt that there is a political or corporate requirement to use marketing droid speakings in presentationisationings.

Goo goo, gah gah

"the next step is to prove out these learnings in flight"

The word they are looking for is lessons, alternatively "this knowledge" or "this experience". Unless DARPA is run by six year olds.

Yes, language evolves, but that is not the same as adults adopting baby talk.

I wouldn't mind what Americans do, but this rubbish keeps migrating into English usage too.

Oh, no: The electric cars at CES are getting all emotional

express moods such as joy, astonishment or approval visually

Hmm

Joy - you didn't get in my way, that makes change or I actually got through two consecutive sets of traffic lights on green.

Astonishment - PC version of WTF are you doing or WTF did you just do you complete blithering imbecile.

Approval - you are not in my way or apparently trying to kill me/yourself, as one of the rare breed of road users I approve

Premium

Definition as applied to cars-

High profit set dressing our marketing department tries to convince you to pay for because you are worth it.

Forget the climate: Steep prices the biggest reason EV sales aren't higher

Re: Too expensive, too heavy, too range limited

You are lucky, I checked for chargers in my parent's town of just under 34,000 people and there are just two 50kW chargers. It is a seaside holiday town so the population doubles or more during summer.

Brit MPs pour cold water on hydrogen as mass replacement for fossil fuels

I liked this bit

The report pointed out that if hydrogen were to completely or substantially replace gas in domestic heating systems, "a massive and costly programme of replacing boilers, meters and network infrastructure would likely be required."

Which will be completed at about the same time cheap fusion power is available?

If there is spare power to produce hydrogen then methane can be produced in a carbon neutral way, new boilers have much lower NOx and there are ways it can be reduced further. While not perfect it is probably a better path than replacing the gas infrastructure.

Airbnb hosts less likely to accept bookings from Black people than Whites

Was the discrimination affected by the race of the host at all?

US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough

Re: Q>1

From what I have read conventional plants can extract useful work from steam to the point that it is too cool to usefully be used for heating homes.

Re: Might now be 20 years away

You need to get enough extra out that you can sell to cover the construction, maintenance, EoL and running costs. If it is inefficient it will be too expensive and just another tidal or wave power dream.

Equinix to cut costs by cranking up the heat in its datacenters

Re: This is not how data centers work

You can get a good idea how the servers etc. are coping by monitoring fan speeds and outlet temps. I have found the outlet temps do not really rise with inlet until the fans are maxed out. Similarly as you drop the inlet temps the fans ramp down until at minimum at which point the outlet temps start to drop. That does assume you are running cold side, hot side rather than room cooling.

You can also monitor the power drawn as fans ramp up to look for a balance in the cooling costs. Well, if it your own room and you are paying for both cooling and server loads.

There does not appear to be much advantage running below 24C for us and, as I found out when the AC packs shutdown in summer, most of the kit did not even start to complain of high temps until inlet got over 35C. Exhaust on a larger router hit 65C and it just flagged up that internal temps were moderately high.

We are looking at moving to using filtered external air for most of the cooling and even seeing if another unit close to us would like the exhaust air to heat their warehouse.

Epson zaps lasers into oblivion, in the name of the environment

Green?

I bought an Epson laser in the early 90's and it worked until I no longer had an XP machine about 20 years later, no Win7 drivers was the reason I had to replace it in the end. Show me an inkjet that can be left for a few months between prints and which will always work perfectly on startup.

UK comms regulator rings death knell for fax machines

Analogue telephone adaptors normally detect the fax on the audio side and encode it using T.38. for SIP

A fax software service will just go straight to T.38 without the noise, then it depends what is inbetween the sender and receiver as to if it ends up as noise or not before being turned back into, likely, another image file.

I don't know why there is much legal standing for the header as you can pretty much present whatever number you like in the header or CLId. A digital document with a public key encrypted hash would give you far more certainty of who had sent it and if it had been changed. The main issue is providing people with personal certificates, no one wants to pay, governments don't want you to encrypt things and if they were issued by a government CA no one would trust them.

UK facing electricity supply woes after nuclear power stations shut, MPs told

Grid scale storage

I think a better way to estimate this is to take the Gridwatch figures for a year for production by the various plant types and the usage. You can chuck them into a spreadsheet and use the renewable values to create an output waveform you can scale to produce, when added to a flat baseline, an equivalent energy in for energy out. You can then pull out of that how much storage to make up the differences you would need.

It is artificial since even nuclear can be varied, however it gives you an idea what you need to match renewable output to demand. It was a few years ago when I tried this so I'm not going to guess the totals, however iirc it was optimal around 20% renewable. I used 100% efficiency for the storage as well so very much approximate outputs, but fun to play with.

Tesla reportedly faces criminal probe into self-driving hype

Re: Please Simplify all the Levels Crap

The Tesla cameras have a range of 250m apparently, which is only 8 seconds at 70mph, however I don't think they start allowing for changes that far away unless they are static obstruction. Even then, as you say, how long will it take the car to decide it cannot cope with something that it has seen and let the driver know? Even driving manually normal drivers can take two or three seconds to notice and react to changes on a motorway, if they are just letting the car drive it could be longer still. Then they will need to work out what the car is reporting and finally react to it. As you say, partial autonomous driving is not a great idea.

Re: Autononmous cars

If and when we have autonomous 'taxis' it will be interesting to see how they are priced. I suspect it will be at least demand based, I do wonder if a vehicle on the way to you might be reassigned if a better/more profitable trip comes up. You might then get an alert with the offer to accept a higher charge to still get the same pickup time or take a new later slot.

Definitely seen this idea in fiction at least.

Cost of living crisis less of problem for tech pro retirees than others

I'm in the 51%, but have already given notice for the end of the year, my company has asked if I will stay on part time, which I am open to if they come up with an offer that does not get in the way of things I want to do. As mentioned above I will likely just be working on things I am the lead knowledge source for rather than expanding my remit. I don't really need to work, but staying on for a while may be better than cold turkey and of course there is the social contact which will be nice.

People are coming out of retirement due to cost-of-living crisis

Re: Not great news for youngsters

A few things, I am more Gen Jones - between boomer and X, DB pensions are fine providing the company does not collapse and you end up with around half of what you were expecting. I bought in 1991 and the mortgage was a little over half my take home pay, granted the actual sum was lower at 3x my gross pay, but by no means was it cheap.

Yes, I did get a partial student grant, but that was when quite a small proportion of school leavers went to university, the push to get 50% or more in higher education is what stopped that. The loans only have to be paid if you get a well enough paid job to do so and they time out eventually if you have not had a very well paid job to clear them.

I'd say the expansion of the internet and social meadia has made it much easier for people to create new businesses now, if you can reach a large enough audience it is amazing what kind of trivial rubbish they will buy. The lad that made a load of money selling car tax reminder discs for example, he reinvested in land, good on him. It is possible to find new things to sell all of the time, the ease of prototyping even physical goods given 3D printing and custom circuit board suppliers has never been better.

Yes, financially it can be tough for some of the younger generations, but many of the 30 - 40 year olds I work with have bought houses, have families and are doing OK and I don't work in a city pay rate business. Just look at the lifestyle we have now, a portable communications and information device in our pockets, the range of foods, activities and convenience equipment, the advances in medicine, the ease with which we can travel. The last twenty five years has been totally different from the twenty five previous to that in which we grew up and had to begin work in.

You want to go back to when there were two or three channels on the TV, pay phone up the road, a take away was fish and chips, the local library was the only place to find out about anything your parents or teachers did not know, cancer was a death sentence, cars needed fettling to start in winter and you never went very far without spares and tools, putting shillings in the gas and electricity meters, coal fires?

Life has never been that easy, just the difficulties and opportunities have changed and evolved over time. The younger generations should embrace and be proud of the modern world with all of the complex interconnectedness and awarness they are living in and creating. To me it is the science fiction I read in school come to life.

No, working in IT does not mean you can fix anything with a soldering iron

Hey, you can drive a car?

There is some weird thing happening with my car and I know you have done an advanced driving course so can you fix it?

Scientists, why not simply invent a working fusion plant using $50m from Uncle Sam

Re: My brilliant idea

That is pretty much what the pellet type fusion experiments do, whether by shooting the pellet with lasers or just shooting a pellet at a target.

Climate change prevention plans 'way off track', says UN

Re: When is a climate denier not a climate denier?

Anyone who says climate change and CO2 are just a small part of what humans are doing and just focussing on the one thing is a bad idea.

Re: So?

It is unfortunate about Pakistan, it appears they were caught unaware of the predictions that climate change could cause extreme weather events. Not knowing this meant they did not try to put policies and engineering in place to mitigate the effects.

Clearly CC needs some better publicity so that when events occur as predicted countries have plans and systems in place to cope rather than it coming as a complete surprise to all concerned. News reports might change to ones about flooding causing quite a mess that will need to be cleaned up, but no loss of life or destruction of critical infrastructure, rather than going on about unexpected events which turn out to be this thing called climate change that has been recently discovered.

Yes, by all means lets reduce the amount of stuff we burn, that may help long term, but that will not stop the climate changing and put things back to 'normal'.

Microsoft warns of bugs after nation pushes back DST switchover

Re: Why is DST still a thing ?

The birds chirp based on the light level not on what time humans decide to call it. Our time systems contain a the concept of midday/noon when the sun is nominally at its highest point. To shift your clock around so that physical midday does not match timed system midday seems a bit contrary. Granted where you are mucking around with DST it means you have the convenience of having more evening light without changing your working hours from '9to5' to '8to4'. If you are not going to use DST then use a time zone the gives you the best match to midday and just sort out your waking hours as appropriate.

BOFH: Selling the boss on a crypto startup

Mainly it is an issue with the crisis diode, they used to be manufactured to a pretty tight tolerance when mainly fitted to copiers and then network printers, unfortunately now they are included as standard in most IT equipment. Much effort went into producing these as a low price commodity product and the accuracy of the discrimination circuits is now quite poor. This means they can trigger under 'in a rush' or 'I'll just do this before lunch' conditions rather than the true crisis level they were designed to detect originally.

TSMC and China: Mutually assured destruction now measured in nanometers, not megatons

Re: Britain, alas, seems destined once again to blithely assume that it'll all work out in the end

The problem is Labour would build a nationalised plant that would produce out of date and low quality parts at high cost, should it be actually needed the worker would go on strike for more pay.

Sony launches a space laser subsidiary (for comms, not conflict)

There is prior art

The Artemis satellite has an ESA laser communication experiment on board and was launched in 2001, it is called SILEX, I did some work on it back in the 90's.